Week 5/2024

EN

Filmmaker Magazine: R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity began as part of the process of cataloging a collection of 20 archival films, then making a trailer for each one, before ultimately deciding that they should be combined into a full film. How did that process develop?

Mohanad Yaqubi: The theme of my research is imperfect archives, which is inspired by Julio Garcia Espinosa’s text “For An Imperfect Cinema.” For him, films were all about experimenting, not looking for perfection. Rather than follow a certain canon, art school or film school, he argues for using an aesthetic that reflects the people’s will. I believe that “imperfect cinema” has to be archived in the same way. The Tokyo Reels are one example of an “imperfect archive.” We’re dealing with an archive of a revolution that never succeeded. [Revolutions] that did succeed already have an archive—like the Algerian revolution, which started documenting itself after 1962.

What does archiving mean, at the end of the day? It’s telling history and forming a narrative.  You rearrange history according to your ideology. Cuba is an example; Guinea, too. But with the Palestinians, these films are part of an imperfect archive that was also transnational. The idea was to take these 20 films and make an expanded inventory. An imperfect archive is not framed: you can add to it. What does it mean to add to a collection of 20 films? Should we make a transcript, take stills, make subtitles? I was especially aware that for people in struggle, who don’t have their own archive, any extra material will become important. Being able to produce an archive is a point of vitality. So, we did the transcript first, then subtitling and scanning. Then we decided to make a trailer for each film, which we put together in one timeline. We added the titles and thought, “That’s going to be an art piece somehow.” So Rami [El Nihawi], the editor, said, “How should we organize the timeline?” I said, “Let’s do it chronologically by year of production.” After adding the sixth film, we watched it through again and felt that there was someone else speaking. The collection itself has a voice, which comes from the people behind it. Those people clearly wanted to preserve these films, but didn’t present them as far as we know, and there’s nothing written about them. We wanted to track the voice of this solidarity movement and polish it. So, the film created itself – we just helped.

Watching chronologically, we noticed the changes in the film material, like the move from black and white to color, or the atmosphere around the political movements. Films that are made in 1967 talk about different things than those made in 1973 or 1982. No one before us had looked at the collection as a collection. Only sovereign people can do this kind of reproduction of archives, which intrigued the curators of documenta, but ended up annoying others. It was like, “OK, we’re in Germany: they have a certain way of forming a historical narrative.” We came in with a different narrative through this archive, one that challenged the normal representation of the “conflict” in the Middle East.

Filmmaker Magazine in conversation with Mohanad Yaqubi1

• 1Sophia Haid, Finn Jubak & Andrei Vilcov, ““A Militant Archiving Process”: Mohanad Yaqubi on R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity,” Filmmaker Magazine, 28 February 2023.

EN

“The film is about the life of Georg, his wife Anna and their daughter Eva over a period of three years: it is the story of a successful career, it is the story of the price of conformity, it is the story of mental short-sightedness, it is a family story and it is the story of a lived consequence.”

Michael Haneke1

BOMB Magazine: And your interest in Adorno?

Michael Haneke: But what do you want to hear? (laughter) When I was young, he was a huge influence. I studied philosophy and psychology, and I graduated with a degree in philosophy. Adorno and Wittgenstein were the two writers who influenced me the most. Now I don’t read as much, but when you are young and sort of looking for a vision of the world, you are looking for people who would influence you, who would guide you. So I’m part of the 1968 generation when everybody was influenced by the Frankfurt School.

One of the other members of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm, wrote about how capitalist society reproduces its structures within its members. Your first film, The Seventh Continent, has always suggested to me the ways that we are the victims of the structures that we’ve built.

I think the movie explained that quite clearly. I don’t know what I can add. To me it’s obvious that we create the walls around us, we create difficulties. But this is a banality. Actually, the horrible thing is that people are trying to destroy things that have destroyed them already. And these are things that they themselves have built. There’s an expression in German, ‘destroy the things that have destroyed you.’ This destruction of things that destroyed their lives is not a deliberate action. They destroy the things that have destroyed them in the same painful way that they created this universe that now smothers them. This is the real tragedy because all the destruction that they provoke is not a deliberate act. It cannot liberate them. 

It’s a difficult film, I think, for many people.

It’s not a revolutionary film, it’s a bitter film.2

“In The Seventh Continent, Haneke seems to draw inspiration from Bresson, in the scene where little Evi waits for her father in a parking lot: We hear, “in the air,” a precise passage from Alban Berg’s violin concerto “in memory of an angel” (the famous chorale that evokes Bach) without being able to identify its source, then, as often happens, we realize only retroactively that the music was diegetic, ending suddenly and brutally when a car owner starts his car. Of course, we do not know if the young girl heard this music, nor, a fortiori, if the music left any impression on her. The brutality of the music’s interruption by a character is a cinematographic effect, which consists of imitating, within the diegesis, a process available to cinema itself with regard to the reality it describes or reconstructs: the power to cut and to eliminate.
Cinema is in fact an art that brutally appropriates beautiful music and can then cut it (through editing), or drown it out (through sound mixing). In the case of Bresson’s and Haneke’s films, it is the very action – or clumsiness – of a character that interrupts the music, whereas in Godard’s films this effect is achieved through editing.”

Michel Chion3

• 1Michael Haneke, Austrian Film Commission, 1989.
• 2Lawrence Chua, “Michael Haneke by Lawrence Chua,” BOMB, 80, 2002.
• 3Michel Chion, in: A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).